“Consider our Choices – How Free is Your Will?”

That human beings are fundamentally free to act in accordance with our will is one of the most basic assumptions of our personal lives, and of our human society. We assume as a matter of course that there exists a causal relationship between our will to do something, and the action that follows.  Our will, then, causes our actions.

I willed myself to get up this morning. I willed myself  to brush my teeth, to pour some coffee, to eat and to drive the car to church.  Likewise, you willed yourselves to get up out of bed and to get dressed and to go out of the house.  In these cases and in nearly every other moment of our waking life, our will to do something precedes a related action. We decide to  reach for the morning paper and then we pick it up. We decide to open the door, and we open the door.  In a physical sense, this is clearly true.  As far as these actions go, we seem to possess a control over our actions – we call this control over our choices, free will. 

But there is a question – historically there has always been a question as to whether our actions arise out of free will – the challenge has come to us from many directions – from the world’s greatest religious minds, from philosophers and from the world of science. Why is free will in doubt, you might ask.

One problem arises first  in relation to our understanding of the nature of God. Theologians have argued that God knows past, present and future in one simple and eternal act of cognition. If the outcome is known or can be known in advance, then any choices that follow must be illusion. Some theologians assert that God not only knows but foreordains in advance everything we’re going to do. St Augustine and John Calvin both understood God in this way. There is no room for free will in this understanding. This kind of understanding can also be called predestination or religious determinism.

 Theological determinism has long disturbed some religious thinkers because, if it  is true, how does one explain sin? Would one sin only with God’s permission? Confusing, too, are our own actions that seem beyond our control.  We are so often  like Paul, who wrote in the Book of Romans,  “I don’t understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”  How can this then be reconciled with an omnipotent, all-powerful God?

Nowadays, according to one academic – [Professor of Religious Thought, Van Harvey,] most contemporary theologians sidestep this apparent conflict by stressing humanity’s freedom and simply staying away from any attempt to characterize God’s knowledge.

That said, the problem of determinism versus free will still hasn’t gone away. Modern science also gives free will a run for its money.  Science tells us that the world is governed according to some fundamental physical laws that are very trustworthy. We know, too, that human beings are physical systems subject to those laws.  We know that when we will ourselves to do something,  electrical activity sends a signal to the nervous system, which then sends information to our muscle fibers and what follows is movement. So our actions may seem free, but every part of every action is governed by chemical laws and electrical laws and so forth. So where is the room for free will in the scientific framework?

You might think this is all only so much theory – and who cares?  That’s a good question. The concept of free will plays a central role in our thinking about the world, particularly in our apportioning praise and blame, in our willingness to admire others for what they have done, and also in our finding persons morally responsible for things they have or have not done. Quite frankly, it’s important for the self-esteem of our species. Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: “What a noble piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god - the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”

 We like to feel good about ourselves. So evidence that we might possibly not be in control of our own destiny could be devastating to our human striving.

 A couple of weeks ago when I was home working on a sermon my daughter Annie, 25, called me in saying “ I know you’re working, but I just want you to watch this movie that’s on for just ten minutes. I got caught up in it and had watched 40 before I managed to pull myself away.  The film, called Waking Life, is – I’m not sure of my terms here - a generation X, or postmodern exploration of the meaning of life.  It’s popular in sort of an underground way, among twenty-somethings.  The film addressed some of these issues head on  asking, “What if we are all merely victims of forces that were set off with the big bang and every decision we make is really no more than an illusion?

 A few years ago when one of my children and I suffered an unusually long wait in the pediatrician’s office we had fun tapping each other on the tendon just below the kneecap with the doctor’s little rubber mallet. If you tap in the right spot the knee jerks quickly and without conscious thought. It was fun because we don’t seem in control.  But to think that all our actions might be that reflexive – that’s troubling.

 When you see someone yawn, do you yawn?  About half of people have that reflex. Some people yawn just from hearing the word yawn. If you’re yawning right now, don’t be embarrassed.   Reflexive or not, evolutionary psychologist Steven Platek says yawn are a sign of something good. Science doesn’t know why we yawn yet, but it is known that contagious yawners tend to be more empathetic than average. We have many involuntary reflexes: breathing, swallowing, coughing, sneezing.  But what if all our actions – even the most complicated, are actually reflexive-like the jerk of our knee or a yawn? This is a question posed by the gen-x movie.

 Today’s young people have grown up in a sophisticated scientific environment.  There is room in this environment for a reasonable person to believe that a human being may be no more than a social construction or a confluence of forces -  That if a certain complex sequence of events has occurred, a person will –must- reflexively react in a certain way. 

 If it were true, how can anyone be held responsible for any action? In the current legal case of Lee Boyd Malvo, the younger of the DC snipers, the defense has tried to convince the jury that Malvo was so brainwashed by John Allen Muhammad that he didn’t know right from wrong.  The jury last week found him guilty. This finding  that he is guilty, strangely enough, affirms his humanity. It means, after all, that Lee Boyd Malvo had the power to choose other than he did.  Malvo will be sentenced in early March.

 You may remember the legal phrase “Twinkie Defense” which came from the trial of Dan White who shot George Moscone and Harvey Milk in San Francisco some years ago. White's attorneys argued that he had been suffering from a long-standing and untreated depression that diminished his capacity to distinguish right from wrong. His condition, they said, had been further aggravated by eating twinkies and junk food. The jury agreed and so found White guilty of involuntary manslaughter instead of murder even though he had climbed though a basement door to avoid metal detectors. The issue of free will versus determinism is at the heart of these cases.

 The list of 'excusing conditions' has grown steadily over the years. One man was found not guilty of murder on the grounds that he was sleepwalking during the killing (including driving his car to the victim's house across town).  Many other 'factors' influencing behavior beyond our control have been proposed:  1) one's genetic makeup 2)one's environment and upbringing  3)one's education which, at least in one's early years   We have to ask, when all these 'influencing' and 'controlling' factors are considered, is there any room left for the exercise of one's own freedom?

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 Now here I’m going to make a rare confession and it’s about faith, where and how we find it. I am certain that there are many people who have a firm belief in God – one that has supported them, served them well, and given them strength throughout their lives – and if those people were asked why they believe in God in the absence of firm proof, the response of at least some would go like this --- they believe in God because to live in a universe without God – without the support of this loving presence in which they believe, would simply be unacceptable. The world would be unacceptable without a God, pure and simple. Not acceptable. So their faith is easy and automatic. 

 My belief in free will is something like that.  I cannot prove that we have free will – I‘m not going to try.

 Admittedly, if we look at ourselves and our parents and consider the events of our lives, we can see our conditioning – we know that, to some extent that we are a product of our genes, of the habits we grew up with, of the cultural views we have been exposed to.  So that much is a given. We know, too, that humans can be controlled; behavior modification is real.  We are also a product of our environment. But we are so much more.

 External stimuli do not solely determine our responses. I hope you, like me, know this in your bones. We can observe this all around us – people in positive environments who choose destructive behaviors, while others who have grown knowing significant hardship and cruelty who become defiantly  kind and life-affirming.  Nelson Mandela, born black in South Africa during apartheid,  imprisoned for 18 years in a cramped, gray cell – emerges whole and wise with a big heart. How do we explain that? And how many times have we read of some heinous act committed by someone whose parents were lovely, who wanted for nothing and who had everything going for them?

 I cannot prove it, but I will not hesitate to affirm that within us all there is the capacity to perceive meaning  - positive meaning - and go for it. We have self awareness – a capacity to witness existence, which distinguishes us from other creatures. This enables us to envision other possibilities.  We are capable of developing an internal sense of purpose.  We are gifted with imaginations. These qualities allow most of us to defy our conditioning if we exercise them. These are only some of the tools of transformation that help us to reach for the stars.

 We are not machines. This I accept as an article of faith. The alternative is simply not acceptable. Without free will the human enterprise would wilt and collapse of its own purposelessness. The importance of our free will to participate in this great enterprise that is life, to prevail over hardship, to contribute and make a difference can’t be overstated or underestimated. Out of our ability to choose the good flows our justice, our morality and our hope for tomorrow.

 Now that I’ve said so passionately that we are not determined like machines – that our behavior cannot be predicted because our will is free, I’d like to close with a reading which does take a stab at quantifying some human behaviors– I may not agree with it statistic by statistic, but it’s worth listening to because, if you believe in free will, you know the numbers, at least where they relate to you, are open to change.  It’s called  A Contribution to Statistics by  Wislawa Szymborska